The Knowing-Doing Gap

Denise Garth is Chief Strategy Officer at Majesco, responsible for marketing, industry relations and innovation in support of the company’s client-centric strategy. She is a recognized Top 50 InsurTech Influencer, with both P&C and life and annuity experience as a CIO and business executive, and in October 2020 was named one of the Top 50 Women in SaaS.

About Denise Garth

Denise Garth has worked across the insurance industry for her whole career: more than 20 years at insurance companies in business and IT roles, ending as a CIO; about eight years at ACORD growing the international footprint and driving standards adoption; time at a technology vendor and at the analyst firm Strategy Meets Action, covering emerging technology and innovation; and then about five years at Majesco. She has seen the industry as an insurer, a technology provider, an industry organization and an analyst, across lines of business and geographies.

Diversity and the Outside Perspective

Asked about the Women in SaaS recognition, Denise called it a pleasant surprise and an honor, as it spans all industries. She sees diversity improving: early in her career few women held senior positions in insurers or vendors, and it has blossomed, though she’d be the first to say more is possible. As silos between industries fall and insurance is embedded in a dynamic ecosystem, she said, the industry will need diversity of thinking and experience, and is increasingly looking for people from outside insurance.

The Future of Insurance and Thought Leadership

As a buyer, Denise wanted partners who added value, stretched her thinking and her strategy, and offered more than features and functions. She has applied that to Majesco’s content: most B2B buyers research before talking to vendors, so thought leadership shapes how they see the company. Her view of the future is dynamic, digitally oriented, with ecosystems of partners that expand distribution reach and add bundled value services.

Majesco’s annual research reports track strategic priorities of insurers, MGAs, reinsurers and brokers, and compare them with consumer and SMB expectations. The finding is what she calls the knowing-doing gap: many know about insurtech, cloud, AI and machine learning, few plan, and fewer execute. A gap between leaders and followers or laggards has widened over five years of research, and with the pace of change could become insurmountable in resources, not just cost.

What Customers Are Doing

COVID accelerated customers, Denise said. Some are looking to replace legacy core systems, often starting with policy and billing, and for some tier-one insurers billing at the enterprise level, because billing is now at the front of customer engagement. Others focus on a digital experience, not a portal out of the box but a move from transaction to experience. And others launch new products: Majesco had announced customers launching a cyber product in nine weeks and an on-demand agriculture product in twelve weeks, which she said reflects the speed of change, since waiting two years to put out a product means the market will have changed.

Positioning Against Core Competitors

Majesco, she said, is in a unique position because it provides core platforms for P&C and for life, annuity and group, plus a digital experience platform (no-code and low-code), and data and analytics, including a data model, enterprise data warehouse and distribution management. It was early to the cloud, announcing a cloud insurer platform five years earlier as infrastructure as a service, and re-architected its solutions to be cloud-enabled, with microservices and well over a thousand APIs in each core suite. Two and a half years earlier it launched its Digital1st platform as a platform as a service, native cloud with rich insurance content.

The Digital1st Eco Exchange is like an app store, comparable to what Apple did: partners create an app, pre-integrated and callable dynamically through APIs from any system, so it is plug and play, not accelerators or point-to-point integrations, and it will work with other vendors’ cores too.

Words That Are Overused

Denise said terms like omnichannel, cloud and platform are overused. Buyers need to ask whether something is truly cloud-native or just hosted, and whether it is truly a platform, which means a rich set of APIs, an ecosystem and cloud. Her benchmarks are big tech: Apple, Google, Facebook, Workday and Salesforce. Some insurers remain on-premise and hesitant, concerned about control, privacy and security, but she said Azure, AWS or IBM’s cloud are much safer than most companies’ on-premise systems, and it’s a cultural and leadership change, since insurers have always done everything internally and must now rely on partners for functions such as document management, printing and cloud, and those partners are in the cloud.

Embedded, On-Demand and Lemonade’s Life Launch

She said next-generation customers want insurance embedded in other purchases and on demand, which requires instantly issuing, rating and underwriting, only possible in the cloud. She cited SoFi, a new-generation bank that offers products from Root, Lemonade and Ladder Life to its members through APIs and owns the customer relationship. Gilad mentioned Lemonade’s coming term life launch, and Denise guessed it would resemble Ladder and Haven Life but with behavioral economics in its questions, creating more competition.

Plan 2021 Differently

Denise’s advice for 2021 planning: it won’t be business as usual again. As a CIO, 70 to 80 percent of her budget went to keeping the lights on. Insurers need to cut back on the existing and invest in the future. Many hold more capital than required by regulators, with poor interest rates, and might invest a few million in their own next business model: a new division, a greenfield operation or a new product, since products, engagement and cost structures will be different. Modernize the existing business because it pays the bills, but start experimenting today, because competitors across all tiers are, and the ones who are quiet are the ones to worry about most.

Advice to Insurtechs

As a mentor at the Global Insurance Accelerator, she told insurtechs to hone in on their value proposition, how it integrates with existing technology, how it enhances customer experience and drives business value, and to look for partnerships to experiment and get profiled, since insurers are busy with day-to-day work.

Advice: Murder Mysteries

For her recommendations, Denise reads James Patterson and David Baldacci to escape reality, watched The Queen’s Gambit, and has been rewatching Rizzoli & Isles. She thinks theaters are another business model likely to change dramatically, and that the pandemic has been a tipping point for many industries.

Key Takeaways

• Denise’s central finding: a widening gap between insurance leaders and laggards, because many know about insurtech, cloud and AI but few plan and fewer execute.
• Majesco reports customers launching a cyber product in nine weeks and an on-demand agriculture product in twelve.
• A true platform has cloud-native architecture, rich APIs and an ecosystem; Digital1st Eco Exchange is Majesco’s app-store approach to integration.
• Most insurers’ resistance to cloud is cultural; major cloud providers are safer than typical on-premise setups.
• Next-generation customers want embedded, on-demand insurance, which requires instant issuance in the cloud.
• For 2021, insurers should cut back on the existing, invest in their next business model, and experiment now.